A fresh assault on the language

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Forget the politicians, plain English is under attack on
the supermarket shelves.

The collapse of the English language under the weight of current
abuse is, if not imminent, seemingly inevitable. So the dour
critics of newspeak would have it, those who believe the language
has been devalued in recent years by a torrent of bureaucratic
jargon, the annexation of words and their flagrant misuse. Don
Watson, one-time speechwriter for the acerbic tongue of former
prime minister Paul Keating and more recently vocal critic of the
assault upon the language, believes that many words have become
little more than shells: words from which the life has gone.
"Facsimiles, frauds, corpses," he calls them. It is as if the
marrow has been sucked from the skeleton of the language, leaving
just the calcareous remains. Dr Watson saves his real venom for the
powerful - the politicians, bureaucrats and ideologues who
manipulate language for their own ends. These are the creators of
the so-called "weasel words" first identified in the United States
towards the end of the 19th century.

But there are others, subsidiary agents of the rich and powerful
whose use of language is both artful and deceptive. Their
objectives are purely economic, aimed at encouraging consumption
or, more precisely, spending. Many of them reside in the worlds of
advertising and marketing. A study by the Australian Consumers
Association has found that simple, joyous words such as "fresh",
"pure" and "natural" are increasingly being used in ways that are
misleading, even deceptive. Despite this, consumers remain
gullible. The study found that the power of such words was still
significant in influencing purchasing decisions. Of the 157 people
interviewed, 94 per cent admitted that the word "fresh" on
packaging guided them. The word "natural" had a similar effect,
with 86 per cent reporting that it had an influence on the decision
to buy. In a perverse devaluation of the language, products that
failed to include such terms on their packaging were seen to be at
a disadvantage in the marketplace. This might explain such
oxymorons as "freshly frozen".

Consumer law seems at a loss as to how to deal with such
abominations. Neither the controlling authority, Food Standards
Australia New Zealand, through the Food Standards Code, nor the
federal Trade Practices Act offer solutions. Voluntary guidelines
introduced in 2002 aimed at ensuring that words such as "fresh",
"home-made" and "real" retained something of their meaning appear
to have had little impact. Meanwhile, "97 per cent fat-free"
continues to disguise sugar levels in excess of 50 per cent, "baked
not fried" makes no reference to excessive salt, and "healthy
alternative" bears no comparison to anything in particular. Perhaps
the bureaucrats can help, but they were the ones who first raised
the spectre of increasing key deliverables to customers.